Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

I love the theoretical situation that doesn't exist as a justification for not doing the right thing. This isn't a "different points of view" - this is the leader of the United States LYING on their platform, and them choosing to provide a link to FACTUAL INFORMATION. There is no "contradictory point of view" - he claimed there was massive voter fraud and there's literally 0 proof to back up his claim and mountains of evidence to counter it.

I think the claim is an exaggeration, but I don’t think that the method is fraud proof.

Let’s see fact checks on diet claims, exercise, claims about social solutions, claims about the economy, etc., etc. Let’s see fact checks on their own advertisers.

Thank you.

Their advertisers are not operating from the office of the chief executive of one of the largest and most successful of nations.

So some forms of disinformation are more acceptable than others even if they have more immediate effects on people?

I look for the perspective here and Sweden, and if its an established fact that the mail-in ballot system used by California can not be abused, why does Sweden then have a significant more restrictive and expensive rules around mail-in ballots?

To be specific, here you can only use mail-in ballots as an exception if you live outside the border of Sweden, and you can only make a request to use the mail-in ballot if you visit an embassy first or use the digital identity system through one of the Swedish banks, which then operate similar to the embassy in its role in identification processing.

Naturally using less security does not mean fraud has happened in the past, but it should be relevant to the question if fraud may happen in the future. If we have factually evidence it won't happen then Sweden should change it rules to make it easier for people to vote and reduce costs to embassies. If we are uncertain, well, then the question is a fair game to ask what is good enough security and what isn't.

This is the "Doesn't cure cancer!" response.

They don't have to be perfect. They don't have to save the world. They don't have to cure cancer. Any improvement is an improvement.

It's even worse than just spreading his usual distract-from-the-day's-real-news nonsense. He's actively dissuading _some number_ of people from voting.

As always with him, the proof is in the projection: he's accusing others of interfering in the election (states expanding mail in voting, Twitter, etc.) while he's actively doing it himself.

The election infrastructure is vulnerable in multiple ways.

The fact that there's a new conservative talking point about the dangers of voting by mail (and no other aspects of voting security) shows that this message is bullshit.

The reality is that the conservative party actively works to curtail voting because they are in the minority and it's the only way for them to stay in power.

So your argument is, if Sweden isn't doing it, it must be a bad idea? :)

Yes. There are degrees of disinformation. Some are worse than others.

Life is not binary.

where does twitter draw the line, and how does that line affect the usage of the platform?

If twitter created some arbitrary rule like "We're going to fact-check all state/government personnel.", then the state/government personnel would just change platforms.

it's a real issue -- it's potentially more dangerous to push politicians to lie on platforms that fact-checkers can't respond and provide feedback towards, and if twitter starts playing hardball against politicians that's exactly what will happen.

A ton of small echo-chamber communities that splinter off as a result of perceived hostility or discrimination from twitter (but really any social media group) and the general public may be more hostile/dangerous than having these groups of people being vetted by the public at large constantly on twitter or other popular platforms.

Pretty much.

There was plenty of voter fraud, like when he was 'elected' but all the ballots were destroyed in an unreasonable quick time frame. Then there were the precincts with more than 100% voter turnout.

Free speech means you have the right to express yourself. It does not mean a private company is at all required to give you a platform... They can moderate content as they choose.

As far as tagging an individual user account in this way, I'm sure there are provisions for that in the TOS that Trump agreed to in order to use the site.

On a legal level, I can't imagine anything has been done wrong. On an ethical level, the only problem I see so far might be that Twitter is taking it upon themselves to be fact checkers, and personally I don't mind so far, I think the public benefit probably far outweighs any negatives.

So...we should do all the other things Sweden is doing for their citizens ASAP

So... don't do any fact-checking because the people you're fact-checking might go to a platform where there's no fact checking? I hope you recognize how absurd that idea is.

Yes, please, let's definitely see fact checking on all those things. I hope that's Twitter's longer-term plan. But I think starting with politicians, especially POTUS, is a pretty good place to start.

I think news organizations are unfortunately choosing to do non-news for ratings, though. And how is Trump interfering with the election? In principle, there are real risks with unjustified mail-in voting, and I think restrictions would protect the integrity of my vote. Do you have evidence Trump is doing this to interfere with the 2020 election?

As I commented in another thread, this is an argument for letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. (The person I was commenting to there utterly missed my point.)

We don't know that the mail-in ballot system here in California is absolutely, with 100% certainty, immune to abuse. We do have reasonably good circumstantial evidence at this point that it does not appear to increase the chance for voter fraud, and furthermore, we have reasonably good evidence, based on multiple studies conducted over many years that anyone can easily find if they care to, that there are very, very few fraudulent ballots cast in American elections. There is, however, also reasonably good evidence that American elections have a history of efforts to prevent eligible voters from casting votes at all, and that this is far and away the kind of "voter fraud" that we need to be concerned about.

As a general axiom, therefore, in American elections, campaigns that have as their goal making it more difficult for eligible voters to vote in the name of "reducing fraud" should be viewed with, well, a high degree of suspicion.

Is Trump lying though? Here’s a list of tons of convictions on fraudulent use of absentee ballots (and other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

> The reality is that the conservative party actively works to curtail voting because they are in the minority and it's the only way for them to stay in power.

Well, that's the tactical reason.

Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.

Yes. He is throwing this particular tantrum specifically in order to influence the 2020 election.

As with most of Trump's dumber scandals, he has already literally confessed to his impure motives.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-nw-nyt-mail-v...

> Here’s a list of tons of convictions on fraudulent use of absentee ballots (and other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p....

wait, 938 convictions over what looks like is over two decades? Just in the presidential election years that's something like 625 million votes. That's very little fraud.

(and there's some nonsense in there if it's trying to present itself as voter fraud...like the California cases of candidates misrepresenting their home address. What does that have to do with any voters?)

Trump is using his position of authority to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about the legitimacy and reliability of mail-in voting. There's a strong possibility that this will result in _at least_ one person deciding not to vote if they're unable or unwilling to vote in person in this year's election. By definition, this is interference.

What risks to mail-in voting aren't already covered by mail fraud laws? AFAIK those laws are sufficient for normal crimes that one can easily commit by mail, so elections don't have any special treatment.

Personally, I'd like to vote by mail because there's a bit of a global pandemic going on. Preventing me from voting in a safe way (with a simple, well-tested solution, I might add) is an outright assault on my right to vote. So the integrity of your vote is really harmed far more by the willful incompetence of those in power.

Hmm. I don’t think that is evidence. He is not admitting to trying to unfairly influence The 2020 election, but stating a symptom of his belief (incorrect or not) that fraudulent votes tend to be for the party opposing his, which is a legitimate, provable view.

As a US citizen, I would prefer to have 0 such convictions. I would not belittle these results, as these may not be all convictions, and these are just the ones that got caught.

And of course even if the sheer number of votes is not on the same order of magnitude as all votes cast, we should still worry because a relatively small number of votes can have an outsized effect when placed appropriately.

Edit: as the first page states, this is not a comprehensive list, but a ‘sampling’.

I think he was just pointing to the larger problem. If we accept the premise that these companies are unable to be unbiased and accurate with the application of their rules at scale, which we have every reason to believe, then the problem is the platform itself.

Well, take a look at the following examples of convictions made for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’ (and other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

I suppose the pandemic is a valid point for wanting to vote by mail, but concerns for voting integrity are still there. I think there should be an easy-to-implement contactless yet in-person way to vote (maybe similar to how you get a coronavirus test), which would avoid the rather drastic action of allowing universal mail-in voting. Know that there are many states who ban / regulate it for good reason.

> As a US citizen, I would prefer to have 0 such convictions

great, but what does that have to do with providing evidence that

> There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."

is not substantial nonsense based on zero evidence, but more importantly (given that this thread is about "lying"), that

> The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one.

isn't at all true?

> Well, take a look at the following examples of convictions made for ‘fraudulent use of absentee ballots’ (and other forms of voter fraud)

163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017. Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.

Those are the ones that just got caught. (And first page says it is a sampling not a comprehensive list...) It shouldn’t happen at all. And it will get worse with less stringent forms of mail-in voting, wouldn’t you agree?

It’s not interference in the scenario you’ve described, because there’s no way to tell such a person would have voted against him. And you can’t ignore the main point, which is voter integrity, which I as a normal American agree with.

A quick Google shows that paper ballots have a 1-4% inaccuracy rate in correctly recording voter intent. That's about 5 orders of magnitude higher, so we should stop using paper ballots entirely, since any amount of inaccuracy is unacceptible.

This feels a weird position to be in as a liberal, but:

You're ascribing to conservativism what should belong to a particular political party at a particular time. Yes, the current Republican party does intend to limit franchise by minorities, and this has literally been stated ala Hofeller.

That is not a conservative position and many things the Republican party does are not actually conservative.

Just as Democrats at their worse can be about finding equality by restricting rights and treating people like zoo animals, the Republicans at their worse are about winning the power grab ethics be damned. And at those extremes, neither party represents the values of liberalism or conservativism.

>I love the theoretical situation that doesn't exist as a justification

You must love philosophy. Is this really the first you have heard someone use a hypothetical in an ethical argument?

There are no facts to support your principle though, just your imagination. For example, Oregon, where I live, has, in reality, been doing mail in ballots for nearly two decades. In those two decades there have been hardly a hand-full of convictions for mail fraud related to ballots that entire time, with millions of mail-in-ballots cast. And there are no indications or notions of any subversive fraud.

There is simply nothing that indicates voting by mail is less secure than our wonky voting machines, but there is plenty of evidence that ballots by mail help more people vote.

The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote. Your feelings of insecurity simply don’t matter, as they are entirely unfounded as well as flat out wrong.

Fraud should be prevented. Inaccuracies should be improved.

It's pretty typical of corrupt demagogues to commit crimes to call others corrupt while they imprison dissenters, etc.

> In those two decades there have been hardly a hand-full of convictions for mail fraud related to ballots that entire time, with millions of mail-in-ballots cast. And there are no indications or notions of any subversive fraud.

But that's the objection. Mail in voting is problematic because the fraud is so hard to detect.

Suppose someone obtains and submits a bunch of mail in ballots. Ballots of people who don't normally vote etc. How would they even get caught? "We haven't caught very many of them" is the problem.

> The only reason to oppose mail in voting, much like supporting rejiggering districts (gerrymandering), is to rig the vote.

You could say it's to prevent someone else from rigging the vote.

Also, this:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-evidence-th...

So if it doesn't really affect the balance of legitimate ballots and only makes fraud more difficult, why would somebody be against it unless they're legitimately concerned about fraud?

Rules around mail in votes vary by state (some disallow entirely for legitimate reasons). My imagination can not determine what you mean by ‘hardly a handful of convictions‘, but here is a list of quite a few specific convictions for fraudulent absentee voting (along with other forms of voter fraud): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

That is some evidence that mail-in votes can be abused. And you should consider how hard it is to detect such abuse. I’d love to see some evidence on why the benefits of mail-in voting outweighs the risks.

Also some evidence on your claims that mail-in voting favors one particular party would be enlightening.

I agree with you that his view fraud tends to be committed by Democrats is something that can be determined to be true or false. Unfortunately for our president, most fraud is committed by Republicans and not democrats.

The single largest case of voter fraud in this countries history happened in North Carolina in 2018. That was committed by a Republican.

If you investigate the voter fraud instances in Trumps own listing you will find that the majority of them are committed by Republicans.

Combine this information with the efforts by Republicans to suppress the vote and you can see the problem. In North Dakota, the Republican-controlled legislature passed a law that required all citizens to have a physical mailing address to be able to vote. Sounds resonible right? Well, this was after a Democrat won a Senate election in that state thanks in large part to the Native American population. Most Native Americans live on reservations in that state and part of living on the reservations is a lack of physical mailing addresses.

Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely. It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.

So you care about voter integrity? What effect on voter integrity is there when the president of the United States goes around spreading lies about the integrity of the voting system?

The effect may be large or it may be small, but there will be an effect. If you truly cared about voter integrity you would care about this too.

Trap succeeded. I don't expect you will hear back from him/her though.

If these echo chambers move elsewhere, Twitter might be a more sought-after media.

Meanwhile, I make the claim that the echo chambers will stagnate rapidly outside a big platform. The echo chambers need constant exposure to gain new ideological members. If left to a private-club-platform, they will not showcase themselves.

Note that there is a strong adherence to the YCombinator’s code of conduct on the current platform - but we come back to discuss ideas here, not to a not-vetted forum. By making the level of adherence to fact checks, discussions will improve.

You are the first person to engage me with intellectual honesty, so thank you.

I don’t care who commits the fraud. I want my vote to count as it should. So that’s a why I believe we should be vigilant about mail in voter fraud.

Your Native American example is an example of a corner case that should be addressed properly. Indeed it is unfair if there were no other ways for Native Americans to vote (surely they could vote in person? If not, I’d classify that as a violation of rights). But this doesn’t extend generally, not does it nullify general mail vote fraud concerns.

And I would add more evidence under the claim ‘majority of fraud committed by Republicans’ in order to be more convincing.

The 300+ page document you cited to proves my point - almost none of those cases are related to states with mail-in voting. Absentee ballots =/= mail-in voting. ALL states have absentee ballots, regardless of whether mail-in voting is a statewide practice. And nobody is suggesting getting rid of absentee ballots, especially not republicans or Trump, because it is how many enlisted persons vote. Of all the states that have statewide mail in voting, none have voter-fraud issues that are unlike states without mail-in voting. All of this is very well demonstrated by the extensive PDF you posted.

And I certainly did not claim that mail-in voting favors one particular party, simply that it enables more people to vote and is at least as secure as any other system of voting that we have in the US. That said, I think it is worth asking - why is one party, with truly zero supporting facts, so vehemently opposed to voting by mail? And why is it the same party that so unabashedly gerrymanders voting districts: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/how-the-...

I know political rants are semi-frowned upon these days on HN, but it is deeply important that we as a society figure this stuff out.

I do care, but maybe our current views differ. Can you be specific about what you think the lies are? I believe mail in fraud is a real concern, and here is a list of convictions for mail in voter fraud (and other forms): https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

I guess I have not seen any factual basis to conclude that mail-in voting is problematic. I get the theoretical argument, and can imagine all sorts of USPS conspiracies to rig the vote, but the fact is we have multiple states that allow mail-in voting, where millions of voters have cast ballots by mail, and both parties have won and lost elections while watching and recounting numerous votes... and there is no indication that this process has been problematic, ever. And certainly no evidence that it is not at least as secure as the voting machines we have, while still facilitating more people voting.

Such as destroying minarets? The Swedish haven’t exactly shown a good record of making positive decisions.

It seems the best way to do this is to move away from in-person voting.

As has been demonstrated at DEFCON for years now, voting machines used in dozens of states are laughably insecure and easily tampered with. Mail-in ballots would be much more difficult to pull off large scale voting fraud with due to their distributed nature.

Don't they still use the same voting machines for the mail in ballots?

And the distributed nature is the problem. At the polls you have representatives of both major parties there to make sure nothing untoward is happening. How are you supposed to secure something that happens literally anywhere?

I don’t think it ‘proves’ your point, because: 1. Absentee ballots are similar if not easier to detect, e.g. you might expect mail-in voter fraud if you see absentee voter fraud or vice-versa. For example, in Pennsylvania right now, the only difference in requirement for getting an absentee vs mail-in ballot is that you need a reason for the absentee, which gives one avenue of verification. Mail-in ballots don’t need any reason. 2. there are a number of categories that could have been done on mail-in votes, because it’s harder to detect with mail-in votes. It may just be a matter of how the convictions were categorized.

I think your distinction is valid and correct, but somewhat pedantic.

You said the only reason to oppose mail in voting is to rig the vote. That’s a pretty strong implication. But I would say an open mind would ask the other direction: why is anyone opposed to increasing voter integrity? You can’t simply ignore that. Voter integrity appeals to me as a normal-ass American with 1 vote.

You may have noticed I haven’t been political, and stay on principle. We as a society should be able to talk openly about principle without corrosive contempt for those with differing viewpoints.

> You're ascribing to conservativism what should belong to a particular political party at a particular time

No, I'm ascribing to conservativism what has defined it since the classic liberal/conservative divide emerged in the Enlightenment (well, except that at the very beginning the conservative position was merely to retain the existing narrow distribution of access to the levers of power, resting on appeals to religious and other traditional bases; it's only after the liberal side had some success in broadening access that the conservative position became actively reversing that progress, but it has remained so since.)

> and there is no indication that this process has been problematic, ever.

It's a thing that actually happens:

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/cudahy-officials-co...

https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/woman-convicted...

https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/cahokia-village-tr...

There are also even more small time cases like this:

https://gvwire.com/2019/08/23/mexican-man-who-supports-trump...

Where it's only one person voting when they're not eligible. Those cases often aren't even prosecuted, but at scale it adds up.

From 2016 election alone: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2019/04/10-oregon-voters...

Frankly, there are dozens of such cases in Oregon alone.

Your "assertion" does not "fit the facts"

> What risks to mail-in voting aren't already covered by mail fraud laws?

With ordinary mail fraud, the victim tends to notice. You have a bill for something but the something never arrives.

With mail in ballots, if someone registers people who didn't register themselves and then takes their ballots, the real constituents weren't expecting to get a ballot and then don't notice when none shows up.

There are also a lot of problems that have really nothing to do with mail fraud. When people fill out their ballots outside the context of a polling place with election monitors, anybody could be intimidating them or paying them to vote in a particular way and then verifying that they do.

Please read the report by the GAI. 15,000 to 45,000 duplicate votes in the 2016 election alone. And that is only what was caught.

http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...

> 163 cases of "fraudulent use of absentee ballots" over 1988-2017.

That's more than five cases a year, of those that have been caught. Five stolen elections a year seems like a lot.

> Probably a lot more useful to worry about the scantron machine accuracy.

The scantron machine isn't purposely trying to alter the election results so the errors it makes aren't all in the same direction.

Look, I grew up as a prototypical SF Bay Area liberal. But I'm not a kid anymore and I can recognize the value of many elements of true conservatism.

I've had little love for every Republican administration, but this is the first time I'm actually afraid of them. What is happening now is not conservatism, it's fascism with a dash of Christian Dominionism.

> Bigger picture, conservativism is about narrowing and liberalism about broadening and equalizing access to the levers of power; conservatives for narrowing the franchise both because of immediate tactical advantage and because of fundamental ideological reasons.

Are you in marketing? Because you sound like it, and I'm not buying what your selling.

Let's try Wikipedia for grins:

"Traditionalist conservatism, also referred to as classical conservatism, traditional conservatism or traditionalism, is a political and social philosophy emphasizing the need for the principles of a transcendent moral order, manifested through certain natural laws to which society ought to conform in a prudent manner."

Now that's a bit better. Using that definition tell me how that applies to Trump's GOP.

Disclaimer: I have no love for the DNC either, but at least with them it's a more genteel corruption and their ostensible goals are not entirely unpalatable.

p.s. @dang, I'm in dangerous territory here being political on HN, but it was meant to be germane to the OP.

It's not a concern at all. Colorado has had mail-in voting for years by default, with the option to show up at a precinct. Every ballot is bar coded. I get an email when it's mailed. I get an email soon after I've dropped it off at an official drop box.

Every current and past Secretary of State from each state will tell you election fraud happens, and that it's rare enough it doesn't have an effect on the outcome.

Trump is lying when he said there is a 100% certainty of a rigged election if there's widespread mail-in ballots. Be clear about what he means by rigged. A system-wide fraud that influences the outcome of an election.

It's the same kind of lie about 3 million voters being "illegals" in 2016 and why he lost the popular vote. It's the same kind of lie he told about buses being shipped up from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to explain why he lost New Hampshire. The same lies about "you will not believe what my people are finding in Hawaii" about Obama's birth certificate. And the thousands of people cheering on 9/11. And the hundreds of people he knew who died on 9/11 yet went to no funerals, zero zip.

And it's the same tactic he used in 2016 to set the stage for his loss. When asked if he would accept election results if he lost he refused to say yes, he only said he'd accept the election results if he won.

He excels at creating doubt and confusion. That's his entire life history way before he was in politics.

He's an asshole. He's a complete waste of space. He's a whiny little bitch. He's always been this way. It's not new. He was this way when he was a Democrat too. As president. As candidate. Before he was even in politics. He has always been a piece of shit asshole. He will always be a piece of shit asshole. And hilariously this is a completely unremarkable observation. The absurd claim would be that he's a compassionate person of strong ethical and moral character, a role model you want your kids to look up to, mimic, and be like when they grow up.

> Well, this was after a Democrat won a Senate election in that state thanks in large part to the Native American population. Most Native Americans live on reservations in that state and part of living on the reservations is a lack of physical mailing addresses.

There is nothing about a reservation that prevents it from having a mailing address. People on reservations receive mail all the time. Even someone who doesn't currently know what it is can find out. And it seems like a pretty crappy voter suppression method if it at best only works until people figure out what their mailing address is.

> Nothing about having a physical address is going to make voter fraud less likely.

Having a physical address proves you live in the district. It prevents people from making a mistake and voting in the wrong elections, or voting in the wrong elections on purpose. It gives the government something to investigate if they suspect fraud. The perpetrator will either have to give their real address (leading investigators right to them) or a fake address (allowing investigators to prove that person doesn't live there).

> It's plain as day that Republicans are just interested in suppressing the votes of people who vote against them.

The Democrats do the same thing. They regularly e.g. schedule school board elections off-cycle (a separate election day than the major elections for statewide offices) so that most people don't show up, which allows the election to be dominated by teachers unions. And there isn't even a pretext for doing that -- it has no other purpose, and wastes a ton of money to hold a separate election.

I don't know whether the distributed nature is a problem, though.

Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up.

You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.

Not sure where 15,000 to 45,000 comes from, as the report itself concludes only c.8500 cases of duplicate voting.

I'm also not sure about the methodology there, so perhaps someone could explain it to me.

From what it looks like, GAI started with 60,000 matches from the state data. Then they... added additional identifiers and confirmed c.7000 of them? How do you get from uncertain data to more certain data in this way?

There seem to be c.15,000 instances of prohibited addresses being registered, which I don't believe alone indicates voter fraud.

> Suppose someone obtains and submits a bunch of mail in ballots. Ballots of people who don't normally vote etc. How would they even get caught?

For a start in California mail in ballots have to be signed and the signature has to match the registered voter's signature on file.

So you're assuming someone can steal a bunch of registered voters' ballots and fake their signatures.

I am not a maths person, but 10 out of millions fits my definition of a “hand-full”. And if you read the article that you linked to, which definitely does not stand for what you think it does unless you based your opinion on the title, it in no way contradicts what I said, which is effectively: voting by mail is at least as secure as any other method we have, and it makes it easier for more people to vote.

Here’s an excerpt from your article about the devious voter fraudsters: “At the time of the election, (Robbins) was suffering from kidney infections which impacted his cognition,” said Oregon Department of Justice spokeswoman Kristina Edmunson. “He does not remember voting two ballots, but acknowledges that he did and is extremely remorseful.”

All those articles are about absentee ballots which absolutely nobody in DC is trying to stop entirely. It is how deployed military persons vote. Trump and the republicans are trying to stop States from implementing state-wide voting, or expanding absentee ballots for all citizens which more states are trying to implement due to a friggin’ pandemic. And yes, every system will have people that try to mess with it. But as Oregon’s nearly 2 decades of state-wide-vote-by-mail demonstrates, voting by mail is no more problematic than any other method of voting and it is more convenient for voters.

Edit: clarity while trying to maintain brevity.

> we should do all the other things Sweden is doing for their citizens ASAP

I hope not. Their treatment and forced castration of autistic people carried on for most of the last century was horrid.

I have never heard anyone describe the Swedish system as perfect. Voting participation is close to 90% so there is very good evidence that we do not need mail-in ballot for people living in Sweden in order to make it easy for eligible voters to cast their votes.

If we are going by evidence then finding the cause of the lower voting participation in the US should be the goal, for which there exist plenty of research studies conducted over many decades. A lot of people have wondered why there is such a large difference between EU and US. The general conclusions is not the lack of more easy to use internet based solutions, but rather to concepts like minimum wages, trust in government, belief in the efficacy of voting, combining the system of taxation to voter registration, access to voting centers, and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity.

The resistance and general suspicion to internet based solutions with weak security should not be taken as a campaign to make it more difficult for eligible voters to vote. A government website where an anonymous user can put in a a registered person postal address in order to trigger part of the voting process should be viewed with legit suspicion.

Nobody examines anything but a tiny sample of the signatures unless there is a recount.

> The single largest case of voter fraud in this countries history happened in North Carolina in 2018. That was committed by a Republican.

The Chicago “Democratic Machine” laughs and says “hold my beer.”

"Extending GAI’s conservative matching method to include all 50 states would indicate an expected minimum of 45,000 high-confidence duplicate voting matches"

GAI was unable to conduct a comprehensive review since a complete data set of state voter rolls is currently unobtainable. (it was denied)

I mean on first pass you can just compare the number of votes to voters

Grave ballots would require new/additional votes. That would sure the expected ballot returns.

There are a ton of ways to verify elections statistically that you could read into

Yes, which is why Mr Trump should address those issues:

- minimum wages - trust in government - belief in the efficacy of voting - combining the system of taxation to voter registration - access to voting centers - and voter fatigue when people have to vote in multiple elections in close proximity

(Let me add disenfranchisement after a prison sentence etc, too.)

And he should not make a stink about mail votes and any number of random accussations. Look at the big picture. He has us debating the finer nuances about one tiny individual bomb in his ground covering barrage of crap. Mission accomplished. How's the Corona effort going, by the way?

Were there a persistent, large-scale problem, a small sample over many elections would detect it, but actually the process is that each signature is matched before the inner ballot envelope is moved forward to be counted.

> It’s not interference in the scenario you’ve described, because there’s no way to tell such a person would have voted against him.

Who they would have voted for isn't actually relevant. The fact that they didn't (in our hypothetical) vote as a result of the FUD is evidence of interference.

If someone was making robocalls telling voters that voting machines in their district weren't to be trusted and some number of people didn't vote, would you consider that to be interference?

> And you can’t ignore the main point, which is voter integrity, which I as a normal American agree with.

What is a "normal American" and why would you say that in this context?

By definition, I'm a "normal American" and I also care about "voter integrity". However, I just have absolutely no reason to believe that mail-in voting, which has been used widely for decades by the select states (blue and red) which allow everyone to do it and by _every_ state which allows for absentee voting, is any less secure than any other method.

If you've seen any of the presentations/POCs from Defcon's Voting Machine Hacking Village, read anything about how easily Diebold machines can be manipulated, etc. I just can't believe you'd make the argument that mail-in voting is less secure in good faith.

WHY do you say he is lying ? He has sufficient evidence that there is indeed voter/absentee ballot fraud going on. Saying that he has ZERO proof is the REAL lie.

The below is just a snapshot. Just a teensy-weensy bit of research will give you hundreds of articles like the below.

Report from Government Accountability Institute: http://www.g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-...

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...

https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/oakland-county/2...

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/central-figur...

https://www.dothaneagle.com/news/crime_court/fourth-person-c...

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2018/07/11/voter-fraud-inves...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-09/duplicat...

This book mostly agrees with you, but would claim even at the beginning it was a counter-reaction:

The Reactionary Mind - Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Reactionary_Mind

Here in WA state, my daughter kept changing her signature and had to verify her mail-in ballot for several elections.

> How's the Corona effort going, by the way?

Pretty good if you don't live in Stockholm. The worst hit areas is the retirement homes around the Stockholm region, which account for most deaths. The other areas of Sweden are operating mostly like normal except for industries that been effected by closed borders. Economically we are currently a bit ahead compared to our neighbors because of difference in tactics in handling the pandemic, but it is expected to go down as the Swedish economy is comparable more depended on exports. Most news focus on the economic depression as a result of the pandemic rather than on the health sector. Latest news is that a few airports are closing down, and that the partially state owned airline is having economical problems.

> Voter intimidation is a lot easier, for example, if you know where and when to turn up.

But for the same reason it's a lot easier to prevent. If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested. If you do it to other members of your household, or your employees or union members, nobody there is independent. Anybody who reports it still has to live or work with those people the next day, so people don't report it.

> You would probably find it easier to tamper with a voting machine if you know where they're going to be, and if more people have access to them, too.

Not when there are election monitors there watching you. With paper ballots you fill out your ballot behind a screen, but you drop it into the machine in front of everybody.

Also, many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots. Which is another reason you want to give people their ballot and have them fill it out by hand and submit it immediately, instead of giving them an unlimited amount of time and access to a computer and a printer while "filling out" their ballot.

Of course the better solution in either case is to use voting machines without security vulnerabilities, but there aren't always enough ponies for everybody.

I don't quite understand why the expect that there would be ~6x the number detected, though, assuming that the ~8500 cases detected is accurate. It would be very (and probably statistically naive) if the minimum total cases was simply because they have only ~1/6 of the total number of state pairings.

I think the other major concern I have, other than the methodology, are the definitions - I still don't know whether 8500 represents 8500 people who voted twice (17000 total votes cast), or 4250 people who voted twice, or something in between, or some thing completely different. Perhaps I missed this.

> If you show up at the polls to intimidate voters you get arrested.

Yes, if this is consistently and fairly enforced, I agree - only doubting that it is because I honestly don't know, and hopefully never have to find out firsthand.

> many of the voting machine vulnerabilities are as a result of submitting specially crafted ballots

Yeah, fair enough. I don't know enough about the vulnerabilities, but if this is the case, I agree.